Although sometimes construed as humorous, Conway's law was intended as a valid sociological observation. It is based on the reasoning that in order for two separate software modules to interface correctly, the designers and implementers of each module must communicate with each other. Therefore, the interface structure of a software system will reflect the social structure of the organization(s) that produced it.

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Eric S Raymond, an open source advocate who co-founded the Open Source Initiative, restated Conway's law in The New Hacker's Dictionary, a reference work based on the Jargon File he maintained for years. The organization of the software and the organization of the software team will be congruent, he said. Summarizing an example in Conway's paper, Raymond wrote that "If you have four groups working on a compiler, you'll get a 4-pass compiler".[3][4]

James O. Coplien and Neil B. Harrison stated that "If the parts of an organization (e.g. teams, departments, or subdivisions) do not closely reflect the essential parts of the product, or if the relationship between organizations do not reflect the relationships between product parts, then the project will be in trouble... Therefore: Make sure the organization is compatible with the product architecture".[5]

The impact of Conway's Law can be seen in the design of corporate websites. Nigel Bevan, a Usability expert, states that "Organisations often produce web sites with a content and structure which mirrors the internal concerns of the organisation rather than the needs of the users of the site."[6] A similar effect may be found when websites undergo design by committee.

Evidence in support of Conway's law that has been published by a team of MIT and Harvard Business School researchers, who found "strong evidence to support [what they term the equivalent]… mirroring hypothesis", and that "significant differences in [product] modularity" were "consistent with a view that distributed teams tend to develop more modular products".[7]

Alan MacCormack, John Rusnak & Carliss Baldwin, 2012, "Exploring the Duality between Product and Organizational Architectures: A Test of the 'Mirroring' Hypothesis," Research Policy41:1309–1324 [earlier Harvard Business School Working Paper 08-039], see [3], accessed 9 March 2015.

Lise Hvatum & Allan Kelly, Eds., "What do I think about Conway's Law now? Conclusions of a EuroPLoP 2005 Focus Group," European Conference on Pattern Languages of Programs, Kloster Irsee, Germany, January 16, 2006, see [4], addressed 9 March 2015.